The recent dabs trend has us troubled. It is, as my colleague Baynard Woods said in a recent High Life column, “mak[ing our] soft drugs hard,” which doesn’t make much sense, and connected to all that, it has enabled a maddening and offensive sort of fronting among users. Just take harder drugs if you’re trying to contrive a dangerous shtick because this roundabout way to get high on THC when there is a very easy and much safer way to get high on THC already is bullshit. The whole smoking-the-wax-off-a-nail thing is hipster-style slumming it—a way to pretend you’re doing something grimy or weird, like it’s crack. Just try crack, you’re not better than crack, none of us are better than crack, also crack is great especially if you like feeling like your head is going to implode for five glorious minutes.

Also, there is hashish, which still gets you very high in many of the same concentrated ways as wax. I bought some recently, kind of on a whim from some dick of a dealer in Canton who had some (an eighth for $65). I didn’t ask what kind it was or anything like that, though I should’ve. The best thing about hash is that you can really make it last. It’s the consistency of a Now & Later, so you can chip decisively away at the block you bought. And if feeling dangerous is important to you, well when I pulled it out and used a razor to shave some off recently at a friend’s house, I felt like a total creep, as if I’d suddenly raised the stakes of the gathering I was at because here I was with a razor and some hard, chalky substance in my hand and it made me feel bad and weird because drugs should be fun, not intimidating—but hey, if you’re trying to be a badass, cutting up hash with a razor blade will indulge that stupid fucking fantasy.

Hashish escalates much faster than weed so the time between smoking and feeling really high is shorter. And because of the consistency, it burns much hotter and stays hot, which makes the smoke itself part of the experience. If you mix it with weed, you almost feel two different temperatures of smoke in your mouth and if you mix it with herbs like lavender or mint to offset the piny plastic taste of hash, you’ve got a whole lot of flavors swirling around your mouth as you smoke. You can easily smoke too much though, which will lead to heavy-headed “I wanna go hide forever” feelings, but drink like two or three Bohs (but no more) along with it, and you’ll avoid that. And there’s no real fun derived from eating lots of food on it, which is a bonus as far as we’re concerned, and it’s a strong but strange kind of high that will make you want to just sit around and rest and think, but if you can convince yourself to go out and about, it plays really nicely with the outside world. In particular, sound is greatly enhanced, so listening to music or nature or even people’s voices puts you perpetually on the cusp of being really distracted or being really focused, and those are kind of the same thing anyway.